booting from ISO image on HD 160

A new init, I would say. Don't you want to run your init system once the new root is in place? I'd want to execsbin-init 3 or something like that.

I'm not going to write the pivot root script, since I recall the last time I did one it took me days of painful experiment to avoid all the pitfalls that should have been obvious - but then I was squeezing the image down as far as I could ... Oh, very well, here's one I did:

# mount proc on ramdisk mountproc

depmod -a while read module options; do case $module in '#'*) continue ;; esac modprobe $module $options

raidstart -a raidstartdev-md-1

# mount real root on ramdisk mountrootfs exit 1

cdrootfs exit 2 mkdir -p initrd exit 3 mount -ro remountrootfs

# unmount proc and pivot to real root with ramdisk # mounted oninitrd umountproc pivotroot . initrd exit 4

# remount and have a look around mountproc umountinitrd umountproc

# #umountinitrd #blockdev --flushbufsdev-ram0

OK, whatever.

Well, you can always do that on spec. It doesn't matter if it fails - it's either already in kernel or nothing worse can happen since you will fail elsewhere lower down anyway now.

Sure, but that goes without saying. One generally matches the initrd to the kernel, since it is usually used to house some modules. I usually have a few trees in there ...

% ls lib-modules 2.2.18pre18-SMP 2.4.3-SMP-XFS 2.4.6-SMP-XFS 2.4.8-SMP-XFS

I really don't see the problem .. you can boot the kernel of your choice with the initrd of your choice as target, no? If your kernel does not support iso9660 then you are stuffed, so I don't see why you should cmplain about being stuffed if it does not support loop. What's in a name? The idea is that either you build what you need to boot into your kernel, or you put it in the initrd, and in the latter case you have to match the initrd to the kernel.

I believe your boss wants an all-in-one solution, all in a cd image rather than having a cd image plus a kernel plus a ramdisk image plus a cd image. As far as I'm concerned, there's no difference, since you can put all those three things in one file and manage the trick via offsets or other magic. You still have to boot your kernel or its bootloader, however, and that needs bios support or other support. For example, booting freedos and then running loadlin is a good way to start out. But, no, the bios CANNOT "boot from" an arbitrary place on an arbitrary hard disk - the best you can do is place some boot record in the boot sequence of some boot loader that will do it after the bios has booted IT. If I were you I would place the kernel image bundle on disk, then generate a boot record file (512B) that will boot it while it is in that place, then add that boot record file reference to windows boot.ini file.

It's not clear what you want.

Peter